The protests by Indian farmers who have laid siege to the nation’s capital, Delhi, are, in essence, a uniquely Fair Trade moment. For while the immediate provocation for the present agitation are the three new farm bills introduced by the Central government under cover of the COVID restrictions,  the most articulate demand from the farmers cannot be missed: Minimum Support Price for their produce. Minimum Support Price is near akin to the Fair Trade Minimum Price in trade justice parlance.

For this agitation is not so much about what these farm bills contain, as about what is conspicuously absent in them. More than what they [the bills] seek to do, what has agitated farmers most is what they refuse to address. The agrarian crisis and rural indebtedness in India is indeed a narrative in itself. While the vast majority of the Indian people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, policy prescriptions of the last several decades have consciously pursued a policy of rural appropriation to catapult India as a developed, urbanised Industrial nation. In parallel, it sought to unleash the forces of liberalisation and corporatisation of Indian agriculture aimed to make the sector attuned to the neoliberal logic of compete or perish. Agrarian distress is therefore not just a policy fallout but its planned intent.  This is despite farming and farm distress being a hot socio-economic issue that invites deference from the political class; only to make the farming terrain in India a graveyard of broken promises.

Three measures of the present ruling administration in recent times deepened the crisis even further. The totally uncalled for demonetisation, which invalidated 87% of all legal tender in the country, the ill-conceived Goods and Services Tax and the utterly callous lock down of the entire country at a mere four hour notice.  The measures impacted most severely the farming community – unaccustomed as they were to digital payments, unable as they were to negotiate the labyrinth of the new tax code while buying inputs or selling produce and unprepared as they were for the humanitarian crisis created by the reverse migration that the lock down triggered.  The crisis deepened and not even the gigantic propaganda and vote management skills of the ruling administration could contain the disaffection brewing in rural India.

Several mass actions by hundreds upon thousands of farmers – some involving marches across hundreds of kilometres preceded this blockade of the national capital now underway. But instead of taking due note and course-correct, the government sought to use the cover of COVID to further institutionalise and sanctify the corporate reign over Indian agriculture. Its logic is that further unleashing of market forces and dismantling of the last vestiges of social security and remaining market intervention mechanisms is the way forward. Not even the fear of COVID now could contain farmers’ fury. They have come and are still coming in droves to the national capital. They are prepared to stay there for months if need be. Their demands: repeal the three new farm laws; make Minimum Support Price legally binding on transactions in agricultural produce.

In effect, the Indian peasantry is telling the government to make Fair Trade the law of the land! The Fair Trade community globally has long tried to impress upon policymakers that a Fair Price is the best farm manure. Hundreds upon thousands of Indian farmers have laid siege to the Indian capital city of Delhi and are determined to stay put until the government accedes to their demands serve as a ringing endorsement of that trade justice truism.

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I come from the South Indian state of Kerala. Yes, Vasco da Gama of Portugal landed on our shores – in fact, on the shores of the very town in which I live – over 500 years ago and heralded the advent of colonialism. He came in search of spices, particularly Malabar pepper. But this might be news to you: from the 15th century through most of the 19th century, the Malabar region of India did not actually cultivate pepper. Our predecessors instead collected and gathered pepper. Pepper vines thrived wild in the homestead farms of the Malabar region, along with probably a hundred other crops which had nutritional, therapeutic and nutraceutical values.

A homestead farm in Kerala was a veritable forest farm. It would appear disorganized, not favoring assembly-line economies of scale and production, and not amenable to organized and efficient methods of fertilizing, irrigating and harvesting. The fact is, it was actually a nuanced, evolved and intricately engineered system whose nerve center was the family kitchen. And the matriarch, the woman, for the most part decided what grew on the farms, what was needed for the daily kitchen, what was to be stored for the rainy days, what was to be shared with neighbors, what was to be fed to animals, and what, if anything remained, the men could take to the market and sell. This is what once characterized farming in Kerala, but it is now a thing of the past.

The spoiler: the market!

Actually, the modern market, as we know it today – that which demands quality and quantity not dictated by nutritional needs, environmental balance or the food security of families and communities. And so, suddenly, the power equations within the homestead changed completely. Now, the matriarch has little say in the affairs of the farm. The market dictates, and men mediate with the market. Notions of value and usefulness have changed. Hundreds of trees, shrubs and medicinal plants that once thrived as wild growth are no longer valuable; instead, they have become a hindrance to an orderly, efficient farm that needs to cater to the market. The food basket has changed, too. Wild food has disappeared completely. Tubers have diminished. Fruit trees have dwindled.

Today, Fair Trade Alliance Kerala (FTAK), the small-farmer collective I work for, is involved in an effort to recapture the homestead farming traditions of Kerala. It is a small dream. Our goal is to grow to a collective of about 10,000 small-farmers over the next couple of years. Small-farmers in Kerala have really small holdings, about 3-4 acres on average. So that small dream means about 10,000 farming families stewarding about 40,000 acres of farmland, creating conditions that are akin to a tropical rainforest in crop diversity and biodiversity.

In the process, we are committed to becoming net food suppliers – and by “food” we mean not coffee, pepper or cashews that we grow for distant markets, but “food on the table,” such as rice, fruits, vegetables and tubers for our own local families and communities. And we expect that women will reassert their traditional role and space in the management of the homestead farming economy. Biodiversity for us, therefore, is a food security issue as well as an issue of gender justice.

What role will the market and trade, particularly international commodity trade, play in this scenario that we strive to engender? Undoubtedly, the massive haulage of commodities across continents is unsustainable for a climate-challenged planet. Food miles and the ecological footprint of our consumption can be ignored only at our own peril. But trade is as much a cultural exchange as it is a commodity exchange, and, albeit in reduced volumes, it is here to stay and desirably so. There is thus the inevitable question: what type of trade must prevail when our planet is in peril?

Well, let me give you a glimpse of the beneficial effect the type of international commodity trade that we practice has on the most formidable challenge confronting humanity today. Our farmers reside in the Western Ghats region of India, and the United Nations recently declared it a World Heritage Site. The environmental sensitivity of farming operations here is critical, not just for us but for the whole world, given the climate-challenged times we live in. A significant portion of our farmlands adjoin tropical rainforests. With the stress that human development has brought on the forests, and with the size and productivity of those forests shrinking rapidly, conflicts between man and animal have grown. What if a marauding troupe of wild elephants get to your farm and destroy what might be the result of thirty or forty years of toil? That is exactly what is happening in several of our farming communities, and yet we almost intrinsically know that farmers and wildlife have to coexist for our environmentally secure future.

FTAK was born in the midst of an unprecedented farming crisis in Kerala created by the plummeting prices of agricultural commodities. One of the first investments we made with the social premium funds secured by selling our products under the fair trade regime was in benign solar-powered fences installed between the forest and many of our farmlands. The fences act as a mild deterrent that keeps the animals within the forests.

The cashew industry refers to large cashew nuts as “jumbo nuts.” But the organic and fair trade cashews that Equal Exchange brings to U.S. consumers, sourced from FTAK, could also claim to be “jumbo nuts” – not based on their size, but instead because they are indeed “elephant-friendly” nuts. That bin of organically-grown and fairly-traded cashews that you come across in your local food cooperative is testimony that global commodity trade in a climate-challenged world can in fact chart a fair and sustainable course.

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My name is Tomy Matthew and I am the founder and a member of Fair Trade Alliance Kerala (FTAK). We are 5,000 farmers who reside in the western parts of India in the south Indian state of Kerala. Between us we produce coffee, cashews, spices, coconut which we commit to the fair trade market.

In the U.S., the iconic fair trade pioneer Equal Exchange buys our cashews and those lovely chocolates from Alter Eco use our fair trade coconut oil to make chocolates for you.

You are familiar with fair trade, but what I do want to talk to you about today is about our self-given mandate that goes beyond the label and looks at the heart of fair trade. For want of a better word, I’d say fair trade as we do it, not fair trade as ticking off the box certification system. Fair trade as we do it is what I call the “Fair Trade plus Three.” And those three items that we add on to what I call the “Least Common Denominator Fair Trade” are biodiversity, food security, and gender justice.

As I said earlier, we reside in the western gardens of India, which is a World Heritage Site, and the monumental sensitivity of farming operations there is not just important for us but important for you because, in a climate-challenged world, it effects all of us. We are committed to making sure that every Fair Trade Alliance Kerala farm is as close to a tropical rainforest as possible. We are committed to creating not just farmlands, not just organic farmlands, but essentially farm forests.

The perennial question in fair trade has long been the question of food security. How can farmers produce their coffee, and their cocoa, and their sugar and have to send what they produce thousands of kilometers away? And then to get their own food from hundreds of miles away. In a climate-challenged world, this massive haulage of commodities across continents is unsustainable. Fair Trade Alliance Kerala is determined to use the enabling conditions of fair trade to fair trade our way into food secure situations.

We are committed to make sure that every farming family is a net food supplier, and by food I mean not the cashews and the coffee and the spices that we produce, but the staples that come onto our dinner tables every day.

And finally, the most significant issue that we deal with is the issue of gender justice. Farming communities in several places in the world have been patriarchal in their construct. What Fair Trade Alliance Kerala has realized is that this is not in the DNA of farming communities but has been a historical burden that has been placed on them.

We realized that when we were farming our homesteads as bio-diverse farms, the women controlled or had significant and central roles in the management of the homestead farming economy because the kitchen decided what to grow on the farm in terms of nutritional requirements and nutraceutical requirements and our herbal medicine traditions. Yet the market steps in and brings in its own logic into these homestead farms. That drives out the women from their central role and makes the men the middlemen between the market and the farm.

We are committed to making sure that women reclaim their central role in the management of the homestead farm. We are also committed to make sure that in the organizational structure of Fair Trade Alliance Kerala, women assume leadership roles and management positions. This, for us, is “Fair Trade Plus Three.” We say that we go beyond the LCD, the “Lowest Common Denominator Fair Trade.” We go beyond the label to look at what is the crux of trade justice in a climate-challenged world today and we say, “This is fair trade as we do it.”

Photos credit: Fair Trade Alliance Kerala (FTAK)

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